SEO Audit: A How To Guide
Have you ever considered how to do a mini-audit of your page? Below are a few tips in how to conduct a mini technical SEO audit.
Audit existing and new pages
Look at your website’s home page URL, and also a relatively new page, such as a new product, service or possibly a blog post. These are the pages that we’re going to audit
Has the URL been indexed?
Do this by typing in a keyword or URL into a search engine. Or, copy that URL but type in cache: before the URL and hit the return key. See the sample below.
cache:https://www.abeytadesigngroup.com
This will give you the date and time of the last time it was indexed. If it hasn’t been indexed, you’ll see a 404 page not found. So, for those two pages, check to see whether they’re indexed. It’s very likely that the home page will be indexed if it’s an established site. Now, if it’s a new blog post, it might not have had time to get indexed yet, so you’d be able to check that out. If your page isn’t indexed, go into Google Search Console tool and you can submit that URL through Fetch as Google.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Conduct a Mobile-Friendly Test, with the tool provided by Google, and test both of those URLs to see if they’re mobile friendly.
Does your page pass the two-second page load test?
The site Pingdom.com offers a great way to check how fast your website is, with the goal of loading in under two seconds. Pingdom will help you learn what to improve.
Google Search Console Crawl Errors
It’s just what it sounds like. The spiders are crawling through the page under your Google Search Console. For the crawl errors that do exist, we want to make sure that they’re not for important landing pages.
On-page optimization planner
Create a spreadsheet considering 5-10 pages that need to be optimized on your site. Add a column for the targeted keywords (include P1, P2, P3), URL, title tag, and the meta description.
This gives you a framework of working systematically page by page. And what you’ll find is that it’s a really good way of making sure that what needs to get done actually does get done. Use this to go and make the changes on the actual live website but it’s easiest if it’s first drafted in the planner.
Competitor research for off-page optimization
Who are your top three competitors? Using the Moz Open Site Explorer tool, let’s look at your home page authority, domain authority and your root domain link in comparison to your competitors.
Open Site Explorer helps you gather some of the metrics: domain authority, page authority, and established links. The root domains are the number of unique domains that are actually linking to your site, and the total links is the total number of links linking to your site, which might mean that some domains are linking more often than just once. Pay more attention to the root domains because each time you get a link from one domain, it’s more significant than the multiple times after you may get links.
When you use Open Site Explorer change the target to be root domain. So that means that you’re looking at backlinks, not just to the home page, but the overall domain. Change the link source to be only external, so it’s not talking about internal links, it’s just external links.